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By Catherine Anderson, DXS contributor

In the first case-based class of medical school, students are asked to answer a virtual patient’s question about the development of the fetus. These students are smart and they know all about betaHcG and are anxious to showcase their knowledge of the menstrual cycle with fluctuating levels of various hormones (FSH, progesterone, etc.). Yet one question brings confusion, “How pregnant is this woman?” The related question, “When does pregnancy start?” leaves the students flummoxed. Is it at conception? But how do you know when that happens? Or does implantation make more sense? It’s a great example of how detailed facts need the larger context.

The usual dating is gestational age, based on the first day of your last menstrual period. However, you can also date a pregnancy with embryological age, starting at conception.

How you date a pregnancy can depend on your perspective. My very general guideline:

But why are there two types of dates? We might need a bit of a primer on the menstrual cycle and how it relates to pregnancy.

Implantation happens between days 20 and 22. Pregnancy is often detected after the first missed period.

This graphic is intentionally simple, removing all the hormones and other fun stuff (Ed: which you can find here). You’ll note that it says approximately day 14 and day 28. In textbooks, we often see that women have 28-day cycles and everything has a nice schedule. However, women are not textbooks and sometimes have shorter or longer cycles and/or have ovulation at slightly different times. Therefore, knowing when fertilization and conception happen can be a bit tricky. An obvious marker is the first day of the last menstrual period (LMP). Why the last day? Well, another variable is the length of menses but everyone has a first day so to be consistent, that is the marker used.

We generally use gestational age when discussing pregnancy. So when someone says that they are 8 weeks pregnant, they mean it has been 8 weeks since the first day of the LMP (last menstrual period).

But that means that the first two weeks of pregnancy has nothing happening. If you are concerned about development, you don’t start counting at week 3 but start at the time of fertilization, two weeks later. Therefore, the embryological age is generally two weeks later.

But remember, we have essentially picked gestational age as the convention for discussing pregnancy dates. If there are markers in development to suggest that the embryological age is different (for example, the fetus is 12 weeks, not 13 weeks), the gestational age is often reported to the mother. In our example, the dating would be changed to 14 weeks.

Due to the difference in these dates, we see confusion beyond medical students thinking about this for the first time. It was recently reported that Arizona had changed its abortion law to be the most restrictive – but it hadn’t. It had just joined other states in making the limit 20 weeks gestational age. Remember, this is the accepted convention for pregnancy dating – but many articles picked up on that initial two weeks of nothingness in gestational age and confused it with embryological age. Was this an example of details without understanding of the greater context?

Opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect or conflict with the opinions of DXS editors or contributors.

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Dr. Catherine Anderson is a Clinical Instructor for the Faculties of Medicine and Dentistry for UBC in Vancouver, Canada. She also leads the Future Science Leaders program, helping teens excel in science and technology. She received her PhD in Medical Genetics and has spent the last 10 years helping people understand the biological sciences: the information and the impact on our lives. You can follow her on Twitter @genegeek.

The four basic categories of molecules for building life are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids.

Carbohydrates serve many purposes, from energy to structure to chemical communication, as monomers or polymers.

Lipids, which are hydrophobic, also have different purposes, including energy storage, structure, and signaling.

Proteins, made of amino acids in up to four structural levels, are involved in just about every process of life.

The nucleic acids DNA and RNA consist of four nucleotide building blocks, and each has different purposes.

The longer version

Life is so diverse and unwieldy, it may surprise you to learn that we can break it down into four basic categories of molecules. Possibly even more implausible is the fact that two of these categories of large molecules themselves break down into a surprisingly small number of building blocks. The proteins that make up all of the living things on this planet and ensure their appropriate structure and smooth function consist of only 20 different kinds of building blocks. Nucleic acids, specifically DNA, are even more basic: only four different kinds of molecules provide the materials to build the countless different genetic codes that translate into all the different walking, swimming, crawling, oozing, and/or photosynthesizing organisms that populate the third rock from the Sun.

Big Molecules with Small Building Blocks

The functional groups, assembled into building blocks on backbones of carbon atoms, can be bonded together to yield large molecules that we classify into four basic categories. These molecules, in many different permutations, are the basis for the diversity that we see among living things. They can consist of thousands of atoms, but only a handful of different kinds of atoms form them. It’s like building apartment buildings using a small selection of different materials: bricks, mortar, iron, glass, and wood. Arranged in different ways, these few materials can yield a huge variety of structures.

We encountered functional groups and the SPHONC in Chapter 3. These components form the four categories of molecules of life. These Big Four biological molecules are carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. They can have many roles, from giving an organism structure to being involved in one of the millions of processes of living. Let’s meet each category individually and discover the basic roles of each in the structure and function of life.

Carbohydrates

You have met carbohydrates before, whether you know it or not. We refer to them casually as “sugars,” molecules made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. A sugar molecule has a carbon backbone, usually five or six carbons in the ones we’ll discuss here, but it can be as few as three. Sugar molecules can link together in pairs or in chains or branching “trees,” either for structure or energy storage.

When you look on a nutrition label, you’ll see reference to “sugars.” That term includes carbohydrates that provide energy, which we get from breaking the chemical bonds in a sugar called glucose. The “sugars” on a nutrition label also include those that give structure to a plant, which we call fiber. Both are important nutrients for people.

Sugars serve many purposes. They give crunch to the cell walls of a plant or the exoskeleton of a beetle and chemical energy to the marathon runner. When attached to other molecules, like proteins or fats, they aid in communication between cells. But before we get any further into their uses, let’s talk structure.

The sugars we encounter most in basic biology have their five or six carbons linked together in a ring. There’s no need to dive deep into organic chemistry, but there are a couple of essential things to know to interpret the standard representations of these molecules.

Check out the sugars depicted in the figure. The top-left molecule, glucose, has six carbons, which have been numbered. The sugar to its right is the same glucose, with all but one “C” removed. The other five carbons are still there but are inferred using the conventions of organic chemistry: Anywhere there is a corner, there’s a carbon unless otherwise indicated. It might be a good exercise for you to add in a “C” over each corner so that you gain a good understanding of this convention. You should end up adding in five carbon symbols; the sixth is already given because that is conventionally included when it occurs outside of the ring.

On the left is a glucose with all of its carbons indicated. They’re also numbered, which is important to understand now for information that comes later. On the right is the same molecule, glucose, without the carbons indicated (except for the sixth one). Wherever there is a corner, there is a carbon, unless otherwise indicated (as with the oxygen). On the bottom left is ribose, the sugar found in RNA. The sugar on the bottom right is deoxyribose. Note that at carbon 2 (*), the ribose and deoxyribose differ by a single oxygen.

The lower left sugar in the figure is a ribose. In this depiction, the carbons, except the one outside of the ring, have not been drawn in, and they are not numbered. This is the standard way sugars are presented in texts. Can you tell how many carbons there are in this sugar? Count the corners and don’t forget the one that’s already indicated!

If you said “five,” you are right. Ribose is a pentose (pent = five) and happens to be the sugar present in ribonucleic acid, or RNA. Think to yourself what the sugar might be in deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. If you thought, deoxyribose, you’d be right.

The fourth sugar given in the figure is a deoxyribose. In organic chemistry, it’s not enough to know that corners indicate carbons. Each carbon also has a specific number, which becomes important in discussions of nucleic acids. Luckily, we get to keep our carbon counting pretty simple in basic biology. To count carbons, you start with the carbon to the right of the non-carbon corner of the molecule. The deoxyribose or ribose always looks to me like a little cupcake with a cherry on top. The “cherry” is an oxygen. To the right of that oxygen, we start counting carbons, so that corner to the right of the “cherry” is the first carbon. Now, keep counting. Here’s a little test: What is hanging down from carbon 2 of the deoxyribose?

If you said a hydrogen (H), you are right! Now, compare the deoxyribose to the ribose. Do you see the difference in what hangs off of the carbon 2 of each sugar? You’ll see that the carbon 2 of ribose has an –OH, rather than an H. The reason the deoxyribose is called that is because the O on the second carbon of the ribose has been removed, leaving a “deoxyed” ribose. This tiny distinction between the sugars used in DNA and RNA is significant enough in biology that we use it to distinguish the two nucleic acids.

In fact, these subtle differences in sugars mean big differences for many biological molecules. Below, you’ll find a couple of ways that apparently small changes in a sugar molecule can mean big changes in what it does. These little changes make the difference between a delicious sugar cookie and the crunchy exoskeleton of a dung beetle.

Sugar and Fuel

A marathon runner keeps fuel on hand in the form of “carbs,” or sugars. These fuels provide the marathoner’s straining body with the energy it needs to keep the muscles pumping. When we take in sugar like this, it often comes in the form of glucose molecules attached together in a polymer called starch. We are especially equipped to start breaking off individual glucose molecules the minute we start chewing on a starch.

Double X Extra: A monomer is a building block (mono = one) and a polymer is a chain of monomers. With a few dozen monomers or building blocks, we get millions of different polymers. That may sound nutty until you think of the infinity of values that can be built using only the numbers 0 through 9 as building blocks or the intricate programming that is done using only a binary code of zeros and ones in different combinations.

Our bodies then can rapidly take the single molecules, or monomers, into cells and crack open the chemical bonds to transform the energy for use. The bonds of a sugar are packed with chemical energy that we capture to build a different kind of energy-containing molecule that our muscles access easily. Most species rely on this process of capturing energy from sugars and transforming it for specific purposes.

Polysaccharides: Fuel and Form

Plants use the Sun’s energy to make their own glucose, and starch is actually a plant’s way of storing up that sugar. Potatoes, for example, are quite good at packing away tons of glucose molecules and are known to dieticians as a “starchy” vegetable. The glucose molecules in starch are packed fairly closely together. A string of sugar molecules bonded together through dehydration synthesis, as they are in starch, is a polymer called a polysaccharide (poly = many; saccharide = sugar). When the monomers of the polysaccharide are released, as when our bodies break them up, the reaction that releases them is called hydrolysis.

Double X Extra: The specific reaction that hooks one monomer to another in a covalent bond is called dehydration synthesis because in making the bond–synthesizing the larger molecule–a molecule of water is removed (dehydration). The reverse is hydrolysis (hydro = water; lysis = breaking), which breaks the covalent bond by the addition of a molecule of water.

Although plants make their own glucose and animals acquire it by eating the plants, animals can also package away the glucose they eat for later use. Animals, including humans, store glucose in a polysaccharide called glycogen, which is more branched than starch. In us, we build this energy reserve primarily in the liver and access it when our glucose levels drop.

Whether starch or glycogen, the glucose molecules that are stored are bonded together so that all of the molecules are oriented the same way. If you view the sixth carbon of the glucose to be a “carbon flag,” you’ll see in the figure that all of the glucose molecules in starch are oriented with their carbon flags on the upper left.

The orientation of monomers of glucose in polysaccharides can make a big difference in the use of the polymer. The glucoses in the molecule on the top are all oriented “up” and form starch. The glucoses in the molecule on the bottom alternate orientation to form cellulose, which is quite different in its function from starch.

Storing up sugars for fuel and using them as fuel isn’t the end of the uses of sugar. In fact, sugars serve as structural molecules in a huge variety of organisms, including fungi, bacteria, plants, and insects.

The primary structural role of a sugar is as a component of the cell wall, giving the organism support against gravity. In plants, the familiar old glucose molecule serves as one building block of the plant cell wall, but with a catch: The molecules are oriented in an alternating up-down fashion. The resulting structural sugar is called cellulose.

That simple difference in orientation means the difference between a polysaccharide as fuel for us and a polysaccharide as structure. Insects take it step further with the polysaccharide that makes up their exoskeleton, or outer shell. Once again, the building block is glucose, arranged as it is in cellulose, in an alternating conformation. But in insects, each glucose has a little extra added on, a chemical group called an N-acetyl group. This addition of a single functional group alters the use of cellulose and turns it into a structural molecule that gives bugs that special crunchy sound when you accidentally…ahem…step on them.

These variations on the simple theme of a basic carbon-ring-as-building-block occur again and again in biological systems. In addition to serving roles in structure and as fuel, sugars also play a role in function. The attachment of subtly different sugar molecules to a protein or a lipid is one way cells communicate chemically with one another in refined, regulated interactions. It’s as though the cells talk with each other using a specialized, sugar-based vocabulary. Typically, cells display these sugary messages to the outside world, making them available to other cells that can recognize the molecular language.

Lipids: The Fatty Trifecta

Starch makes for good, accessible fuel, something that we immediately attack chemically and break up for quick energy. But fats are energy that we are supposed to bank away for a good long time and break out in times of deprivation. Like sugars, fats serve several purposes, including as a dense source of energy and as a universal structural component of cell membranes everywhere.

Fats: the Good, the Bad, the Neutral

Turn again to a nutrition label, and you’ll see a few references to fats, also known as lipids. (Fats are slightly less confusing that sugars in that they have only two names.) The label may break down fats into categories, including trans fats, saturated fats, unsaturated fats, and cholesterol. You may have learned that trans fats are “bad” and that there is good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, but what does it all mean?

Let’s start with what we mean when we say saturated fat. The question is, saturated with what? There is a specific kind of dietary fat call the triglyceride. As its name implies, it has a structural motif in which something is repeated three times. That something is a chain of carbons and hydrogens, hanging off in triplicate from a head made of glycerol, as the figure shows. Those three carbon-hydrogen chains, or fatty acids, are the “tri” in a triglyceride. Chains like this can be many carbons long.

Double X Extra: We call a fatty acid a fatty acid because it’s got a carboxylic acid attached to a fatty tail. A triglyceride consists of three of these fatty acids attached to a molecule called glycerol. Our dietary fat primarily consists of these triglycerides.

Triglycerides come in several forms. You may recall that carbon can form several different kinds of bonds, including single bonds, as with hydrogen, and double bonds, as with itself. A chain of carbon and hydrogens can have every single available carbon bond taken by a hydrogen in single covalent bond. This scenario of hydrogen saturation yields a saturated fat. The fat is saturated to its fullest with every covalent bond taken by hydrogens single bonded to the carbons.

Saturated fats have predictable characteristics. They lie flat easily and stick to each other, meaning that at room temperature, they form a dense solid. You will realize this if you find a little bit of fat on you to pinch. Does it feel pretty solid? That’s because animal fat is saturated fat. The fat on a steak is also solid at room temperature, and in fact, it takes a pretty high heat to loosen it up enough to become liquid. Animals are not the only organisms that produce saturated fat–avocados and coconuts also are known for their saturated fat content.

The top graphic above depicts a triglyceride with the glycerol, acid, and three hydrocarbon tails. The tails of this saturated fat, with every possible hydrogen space occupied, lie comparatively flat on one another, and this kind of fat is solid at room temperature. The fat on the bottom, however, is unsaturated, with bends or kinks wherever two carbons have double bonded, booting a couple of hydrogens and making this fat unsaturated, or lacking some hydrogens. Because of the space between the bumps, this fat is probably not solid at room temperature, but liquid.

You can probably now guess what an unsaturated fat is–one that has one or more hydrogens missing. Instead of single bonding with hydrogens at every available space, two or more carbons in an unsaturated fat chain will form a double bond with carbon, leaving no space for a hydrogen. Because some carbons in the chain share two pairs of electrons, they physically draw closer to one another than they do in a single bond. This tighter bonding result in a “kink” in the fatty acid chain.

In a fat with these kinks, the three fatty acids don’t lie as densely packed with each other as they do in a saturated fat. The kinks leave spaces between them. Thus, unsaturated fats are less dense than saturated fats and often will be liquid at room temperature. A good example of a liquid unsaturated fat at room temperature is canola oil.

A few decades ago, food scientists discovered that unsaturated fats could be resaturated or hydrogenated to behave more like saturated fats and have a longer shelf life. The process of hydrogenation–adding in hydrogens–yields trans fat. This kind of processed fat is now frowned upon and is being removed from many foods because of its associations with adverse health effects. If you check a food label and it lists among the ingredients “partially hydrogenated” oils, that can mean that the food contains trans fat.

Double X Extra: A triglyceride can have up to three different fatty acids attached to it. Canola oil, for example, consists primarily of oleic acid, linoleic acid, and linolenic acid, all of which are unsaturated fatty acids with 18 carbons in their chains.

Why do we take in fat anyway? Fat is a necessary nutrient for everything from our nervous systems to our circulatory health. It also, under appropriate conditions, is an excellent way to store up densely packaged energy for the times when stores are running low. We really can’t live very well without it.

Phospholipids: An Abundant Fat

You may have heard that oil and water don’t mix, and indeed, it is something you can observe for yourself. Drop a pat of butter–pure saturated fat–into a bowl of water and watch it just sit there. Even if you try mixing it with a spoon, it will just sit there. Now, drop a spoon of salt into the water and stir it a bit. The salt seems to vanish. You’ve just illustrated the difference between a water-fearing (hydrophobic) and a water-loving (hydrophilic) substance.

Generally speaking, compounds that have an unequal sharing of electrons (like ions or anything with a covalent bond between oxygen and hydrogen or nitrogen and hydrogen) will be hydrophilic. The reason is that a charge or an unequal electron sharing gives the molecule polarity that allows it to interact with water through hydrogen bonds. A fat, however, consists largely of hydrogen and carbon in those long chains. Carbon and hydrogen have roughly equivalent electronegativities, and their electron-sharing relationship is relatively nonpolar. Fat, lacking in polarity, doesn’t interact with water. As the butter demonstrated, it just sits there.

There is one exception to that little maxim about fat and water, and that exception is the phospholipid. This lipid has a special structure that makes it just right for the job it does: forming the membranes of cells. A phospholipid consists of a polar phosphate head–P and O don’t share equally–and a couple of nonpolar hydrocarbon tails, as the figure shows. If you look at the figure, you’ll see that one of the two tails has a little kick in it, thanks to a double bond between the two carbons there.

Phospholipids form a double layer and are the major structural components of cell membranes. Their bend, or kick, in one of the hydrocarbon tails helps ensure fluidity of the cell membrane. The molecules are bipolar, with hydrophilic heads for interacting with the internal and external watery environments of the cell and hydrophobic tails that help cell membranes behave as general security guards.

The kick and the bipolar (hydrophobic and hydrophilic) nature of the phospholipid make it the perfect molecule for building a cell membrane. A cell needs a watery outside to survive. It also needs a watery inside to survive. Thus, it must face the inside and outside worlds with something that interacts well with water. But it also must protect itself against unwanted intruders, providing a barrier that keeps unwanted things out and keeps necessary molecules in.

Phospholipids achieve it all. They assemble into a double layer around a cell but orient to allow interaction with the watery external and internal environments. On the layer facing the inside of the cell, the phospholipids orient their polar, hydrophilic heads to the watery inner environment and their tails away from it. On the layer to the outside of the cell, they do the same.

As the figure shows, the result is a double layer of phospholipids with each layer facing a polar, hydrophilic head to the watery environments. The tails of each layer face one another. They form a hydrophobic, fatty moat around a cell that serves as a general gatekeeper, much in the way that your skin does for you. Charged particles cannot simply slip across this fatty moat because they can’t interact with it. And to keep the fat fluid, one tail of each phospholipid has that little kick, giving the cell membrane a fluid, liquidy flow and keeping it from being solid and unforgiving at temperatures in which cells thrive.

Steroids: Here to Pump You Up?

Our final molecule in the lipid fatty trifecta is cholesterol. As you may have heard, there are a few different kinds of cholesterol, some of which we consider to be “good” and some of which is “bad.” The good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, in part helps us out because it removes the bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein or LDL, from our blood. The presence of LDL is associated with inflammation of the lining of the blood vessels, which can lead to a variety of health problems.

But cholesterol has some other reasons for existing. One of its roles is in the maintenance of cell membrane fluidity. Cholesterol is inserted throughout the lipid bilayer and serves as a block to the fatty tails that might otherwise stick together and become a bit too solid.

Cholesterol’s other starring role as a lipid is as the starting molecule for a class of hormones we called steroids or steroid hormones. With a few snips here and additions there, cholesterol can be changed into the steroid hormones progesterone, testosterone, or estrogen. These molecules look quite similar, but they play very different roles in organisms. Testosterone, for example, generally masculinizes vertebrates (animals with backbones), while progesterone and estrogen play a role in regulating the ovulatory cycle.

Double X Extra: A hormone is a blood-borne signaling molecule. It can be lipid based, like testosterone, or short protein, like insulin.

Proteins

As you progress through learning biology, one thing will become more and more clear: Most cells function primarily as protein factories. It may surprise you to learn that proteins, which we often talk about in terms of food intake, are the fundamental molecule of many of life’s processes. Enzymes, for example, form a single broad category of proteins, but there are millions of them, each one governing a small step in the molecular pathways that are required for living.

Levels of Structure

Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. A few amino acids strung together is called a peptide, while many many peptides linked together form a polypeptide. When many amino acids strung together interact with each other to form a properly folded molecule, we call that molecule a protein.

For a string of amino acids to ultimately fold up into an active protein, they must first be assembled in the correct order. The code for their assembly lies in the DNA, but once that code has been read and the amino acid chain built, we call that simple, unfolded chain the primary structure of the protein.

This chain can consist of hundreds of amino acids that interact all along the sequence. Some amino acids are hydrophobic and some are hydrophilic. In this context, like interacts best with like, so the hydrophobic amino acids will interact with one another, and the hydrophilic amino acids will interact together. As these contacts occur along the string of molecules, different conformations will arise in different parts of the chain. We call these different conformations along the amino acid chain the protein’s secondary structure.

Once those interactions have occurred, the protein can fold into its final, or tertiary structure and be ready to serve as an active participant in cellular processes. To achieve the tertiary structure, the amino acid chain’s secondary interactions must usually be ongoing, and the pH, temperature, and salt balance must be just right to facilitate the folding. This tertiary folding takes place through interactions of the secondary structures along the different parts of the amino acid chain.

The final product is a properly folded protein. If we could see it with the naked eye, it might look a lot like a wadded up string of pearls, but that “wadded up” look is misleading. Protein folding is a carefully regulated process that is determined at its core by the amino acids in the chain: their hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity and how they interact together.

In many instances, however, a complete protein consists of more than one amino acid chain, and the complete protein has two or more interacting strings of amino acids. A good example is hemoglobin in red blood cells. Its job is to grab oxygen and deliver it to the body’s tissues. A complete hemoglobin protein consists of four separate amino acid chains all properly folded into their tertiary structures and interacting as a single unit. In cases like this involving two or more interacting amino acid chains, we say that the final protein has a quaternary structure. Some proteins can consist of as many as a dozen interacting chains, behaving as a single protein unit.

A Plethora of Purposes

What does a protein do? Let us count the ways. Really, that’s almost impossible because proteins do just about everything. Some of them tag things. Some of them destroy things. Some of them protect. Some mark cells as “self.” Some serve as structural materials, while others are highways or motors. They aid in communication, they operate as signaling molecules, they transfer molecules and cut them up, they interact with each other in complex, interrelated pathways to build things up and break things down. They regulate genes and package DNA, and they regulate and package each other.

As described above, proteins are the final folded arrangement of a string of amino acids. One way we obtain these building blocks for the millions of proteins our bodies make is through our diet. You may hear about foods that are high in protein or people eating high-protein diets to build muscle. When we take in those proteins, we can break them apart and use the amino acids that make them up to build proteins of our own.

Nucleic Acids

How does a cell know which proteins to make? It has a code for building them, one that is especially guarded in a cellular vault in our cells called the nucleus. This code is deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. The cell makes a copy of this code and send it out to specialized structures that read it and build proteins based on what they read. As with any code, a typo–a mutation–can result in a message that doesn’t make as much sense. When the code gets changed, sometimes, the protein that the cell builds using that code will be changed, too.

Biohazard!The names associated with nucleic acids can be confusing because they all start with nucle-. It may seem obvious or easy now, but a brain freeze on a test could mix you up. You need to fix in your mind that the shorter term (10 letters, four syllables), nucleotide, refers to the smaller molecule, the three-part building block. The longer term (12 characters, including the space, and five syllables), nucleic acid, which is inherent in the names DNA and RNA, designates the big, long molecule.

DNA vs. RNA: A Matter of Structure

DNA and its nucleic acid cousin, ribonucleic acid, or RNA, are both made of the same kinds of building blocks. These building blocks are called nucleotides. Each nucleotide consists of three parts: a sugar (ribose for RNA and deoxyribose for DNA), a phosphate, and a nitrogenous base. In DNA, every nucleotide has identical sugars and phosphates, and in RNA, the sugar and phosphate are also the same for every nucleotide.

So what’s different? The nitrogenous bases. DNA has a set of four to use as its coding alphabet. These are the purines, adenine and guanine, and the pyrimidines, thymine and cytosine. The nucleotides are abbreviated by their initial letters as A, G, T, and C. From variations in the arrangement and number of these four molecules, all of the diversity of life arises. Just four different types of the nucleotide building blocks, and we have you, bacteria, wombats, and blue whales.

RNA is also basic at its core, consisting of only four different nucleotides. In fact, it uses three of the same nitrogenous bases as DNA–A, G, and C–but it substitutes a base called uracil (U) where DNA uses thymine. Uracil is a pyrimidine.

DNA vs. RNA: Function Wars

An interesting thing about the nitrogenous bases of the nucleotides is that they pair with each other, using hydrogen bonds, in a predictable way. An adenine will almost always bond with a thymine in DNA or a uracil in RNA, and cytosine and guanine will almost always bond with each other. This pairing capacity allows the cell to use a sequence of DNA and build either a new DNA sequence, using the old one as a template, or build an RNA sequence to make a copy of the DNA.

These two different uses of A-T/U and C-G base pairing serve two different purposes. DNA is copied into DNA usually when a cell is preparing to divide and needs two complete sets of DNA for the new cells. DNA is copied into RNA when the cell needs to send the code out of the vault so proteins can be built. The DNA stays safely where it belongs.

RNA is really a nucleic acid jack-of-all-trades. It not only serves as the copy of the DNA but also is the main component of the two types of cellular workers that read that copy and build proteins from it. At one point in this process, the three types of RNA come together in protein assembly to make sure the job is done right.

Politics often interferes where it has no natural business, and one of those places is the discussion among a teenager, her parents, and her doctor or between a woman and her doctor about the best choices for health. The hottest button politics is pushing right now takes the form of a tiny hormone-containing pill known popularly as the birth control pill or, simply, The Pill. This hormonal medication, when taken correctly (same time every day, every day), does indeed prevent pregnancy. But like just about any other medication, this one has multiple uses, the majority of them unrelated to pregnancy prevention.

But let’s start with pregnancy prevention first and get it out of the way. When I used to ask my students how these hormone pills work, they almost invariably answered, “By making your body think it is pregnant.” That’s not correct. We take advantage of our understanding of how our bodies regulate hormones not to mimic pregnancy, exactly, but instead to flatten out what we usually talk about as a hormone cycle.

The Menstrual Cycle

In a hormonally cycling girl or woman, the brain talks to the ovaries and the ovaries send messages to the uterus and back to the brain. All this chat takes place via chemicals called hormones. In human females, the ovarian hormones are progesterone and estradiol, a type of estrogen, and the brain hormones are luteinizing hormoneand follicle-stimulating hormone. The levels of these four hormones drive what we think of as the menstrual cycle, which exists to prepare an egg for fertilization and to make the uterine lining ready to receive a fertilized egg, should it arrive.

Fig. 1. Female reproductive anatomy. Credit: Jeanne Garbarino.

In the theoretical 28-day cycle, fertilization (fusion of sperm and egg), if it occurs, will happen about 14 days in, timed with ovulation, or release of the egg from the ovary into the Fallopian tube or oviduct (see video–watch for the tiny egg–and Figure 1). The fertilized egg will immediately start dividing, and a ball of cells (called a blastocyst) that ultimately develops is expected to arrive at the uterus a few days later.

If the ball of cells shows up and implants in the uterine wall, the ovary continues producing progesterone to keep that fluffy, welcoming uterine lining in place. If nothing shows up, the ovaries drop output of estradiol and progesterone so that the uterus releases its lining of cells (which girls and women recognize as their “period”), and the cycle starts all over again.

A typical cycle

The typical cycle (which almost no girl or woman seems to have) begins on day 1 when a girl or woman starts her “period.” This bleeding is the shedding of the uterine lining, a letting go of tissue because the ovaries have bottomed out production of the hormones that keep the tissue intact. During this time, the brain and ovaries are in communication. In the first two weeks of the cycle, called the “follicular phase” (see Figure 2), an ovary has the job of promoting an egg to mature. The egg is protected inside a follicle that spends about 14 days reaching maturity. During this time, the ovary produces estrogen at increasing levels, which causes thickening of the uterine lining, until the estradiol hits a peak about midway through the cycle. This spike sends a hormone signal to the brain, which responds with a hormone spike of its own.

Fig. 2. Top: Day of cycle and phases. Second row: Body temperature (at waking) through cycle.Third row: Hormones and their levels. Fourth row: What the ovaries are doing.Fifth row: What the uterus is doing. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In the figure, you can see this spike as the red line indicating luteinizing hormone. A smaller spike of follicle-stimulating hormone (blue line), also from the brain, occurs simultaneously. These two hormones along with the estradiol peak result in the follicle expelling the egg from the ovary into the Fallopian tube, or oviduct (Figure 3, step 4). That’s ovulation.

Fun fact: Right when the estrogen spikes, a woman’s body temperature will typically drop a bit (see “Basal body temperature” in the figure), so many women have used temperature monitoring to know that ovulation is happening. Some women also may experience a phenomenon called mittelschmerz, a pain sensation on the side where ovulation is occurring; ovaries trade off follicle duties with each cycle.

The window of time for a sperm to meet the egg is usually very short, about a day. Meanwhile, as the purple line in the “hormone level” section of Figure 2 shows, the ovary in question immediately begins pumping out progesterone, which maintains that proliferated uterine lining should a ball of dividing cells show up.

The structure in the ovary responsible for this phase, the luteal phase, is the corpus luteum (“yellow body”; see Figure 3, step 5), which puts out progesterone for a couple of weeks after ovulation to keep the uterine lining in place. If nothing implants, the corpus luteum degenerates (Figure 3, step 6). If implantation takes place, this structure will (should) instead continue producing progesterone through the early weeks of pregnancy to ensure that the lining doesn’t shed.

How do hormones in a pill stop all of this?

The hormones from the brain–luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone– spike because the brain gets signals from the ovarian hormones. When a girl or woman takes the pills, which contain synthetics of ovarian hormones, the hormone dose doesn’t peak that way. Instead, the pills expose the girl or woman to a flat daily dose of hormones (synthetic estradiol and synthetic progesterone) or hormone (synthetic progesterone only). Without these peaks (and valleys), the brain doesn’t release the hormones that trigger follicle maturation or ovulation. Without follicle maturation and ovulation, no egg will be present for fertilization.

Most prescriptions of hormone pills are for packets of 28 pills. Typically, seven of these pills–sometimes fewer–are “dummy pills.” During the time a woman takes these dummy pills, her body shows the signs of withdrawal from the hormones, usually as a fairly light bleeding for those days, known as “withdrawal bleeding.” With the lowest-dose pills, the uterine lining may proliferate very little, so that this bleeding can be quite light compared to what a woman might experience under natural hormone influences.

How important are hormonal interventions for birth control?

Every woman has a story to tell, and the stories about the importance of hormonal birth control are legion. My personal story is this: I have three children. With our last son, I had two transient ischemic attacks at the end of the pregnancy, tiny strokes resulting from high blood pressure in the pregnancy. I had to undergo an immediate induction. This was the second time I’d had this condition, called pre-eclampsia, having also had this with our first son. My OB-GYN told me under no uncertain terms that I could not–should not–get pregnant again, as a pregnancy could be life threatening.

But I’m married, happily. As my sister puts it, my husband and I “like each other.” We had to have a failsafe method of ensuring that I wouldn’t become pregnant and endanger my life. For several years, hormonal medication made that possible. After I began having cluster headaches and high blood pressure on this medication in my forties, my OB-GYN and I talked about options, and we ultimately turned to surgery to prevent pregnancy.

But surgery is almost always not reversible. For a younger woman, it’s not the temporary option that hormonal pills provide. Hormonal interventions also are available in other forms, including as a vaginal ring, intrauterine device (some are hormonal), and implants, all reversible.

One of the most important things a society can do for its own health is to ensure that women in that society have as much control as possible over their reproduction. Thanks to hormonal interventions, although I’ve been capable of childbearing for 30 years, I’ve had only three children in that time. The ability to control my childbearing has meant I’ve been able to focus on being the best woman, mother, friend, and partner I can be, not only for myself and my family, but as a contributor to society, as well.

What are other uses of hormonal interventions?

Heavy, painful, or irregular periods. Did you read that part about how flat hormone inputs can mean less build up of the uterine lining and thus less bleeding and a shorter period? Many girls and women who lack hormonal interventions experience bleeding so heavy that they become anemic. This kind of bleeding can take a girl or woman out of commission for days at a time, in addition to threatening her health. Pain and irregular bleeding also are disabling and negatively affect quality of life on a frequent basis. Taking a single pill each day can make it all better.

Unfortunately, the current political climate can take this situation–especially for teenage girls–and cast it as a personal moral failing with implications that a girl who takes hormonal medications is a “slut,” rather than the real fact that this hormonal intervention is literally maintaining the regularity of her health.

For some context, imagine that a whenever a boy or man produced sperm, it was painful or caused extensive blood loss that resulted in anemia. Would there be any issues raised with providing a medication that successfully addressed this problem?

Polycystic ovarian syndrome. This syndrome is, at its core, an imbalance of the ovarian hormones that is associated with all kinds of problems, from acne to infertility to overweight touterine cancer. Guess what balances those hormones back out? Yes. Hormonal medication, otherwise known as The Pill.

Again, for some context, imagine that this syndrome affected testes instead of ovaries, and caused boys and men to become infertile, experience extreme pain in the testes, gain weight, be at risk for diabetes, and lose their hair. Would there be an issue with providing appropriate hormonal medication to address this problem?

Acne. I had a friend in high school who was on hormonal medication, not because she was sexually active (she was not) but because she struggled for years with acne. This is an FDA-approved use of this medication.

Are there health benefits of hormonal interventions?

In a word, yes. They can protect against certain cancers, including ovarian and endometrial, or uterine, cancer. Women die from these cancers, and this protection is not negligible. They may also help protect against osteoporosis, or bone loss. In cases like mine, they protect against a potentially life-threatening pregnancy.

Yes. No medical intervention is without risk. In the case of hormonal interventions, lifestyle habits such as smoking can enhance risk for high blood pressure and blood clots. Age can be a factor, although–as I can attest–women no longer have to stop taking hormonal interventions after age 35 as long as they are nonsmokers and blood pressure is normal. These interventions have been associated with a decrease in some cancers, as I’ve noted, but also with an increase in others, such as liver cancer, over the long term. The effect on breast cancer risk is mixed and may have to do with how long taking the medication delays childbearing. ETA: PLoS Medicine just published a paper (open access) addressing the effects of hormonal interventions on cancer risk.

It was September of 2006. Due to certain events taking place on a certain evening after a certain bottle (or two) of wine, my body was transformed into a human incubator. While I will not describe the events leading up to that very moment, I will dissect the way in which we propagate our species through a magnificent process called fertilization.

During the fertilization play, there are two stars: the sperm cell and the egg cell. The sperm cell hails from a male and is the end product of a series of developmental stages occurring in the testes. The egg cell (or ovum), which is produced by a female, is the largest cell in the human body and becomes a fertilizable entity as a result of the ovulatory process. But to truly understand what is happening at the moment of fertilization, it is important to know more about the cells from which all human life is derived.

Act I: Of sperm and eggs

A sperm cell is described as having a “head” section and a “tail” section. The head, which is shaped like a flattened oval, contains most of the cellular components, including DNA. The head also contains an important structure called an acrosome, which is basically a sac containing enzymes that will help the sperm fuse with an egg (more about the acrosome below). The role of the tail portion of sperm is to act as a propeller, allowing these cells to “swim.” At the top of the tail, near where it meets the head, are a ton of tiny structures called mitochondria. These kidney-shaped components are the powerhouses of all cells, and they generate the energy required for the sperm tail to move the sperm toward its target: the egg.

The egg is a spherical cell containing the usual components, including DNA and mitochondria. However, it differs from other human cells thanks to the presence of a protective shell called the zona pellucida. The egg cell also contains millions of tiny sacs, termed cortical granules, that serve a similar function to the acrosome in sperm cells (more on the granules below).

Act II: A sperm cell’s journey to the center of the universefemale reproductive system

Given the cyclical nature of the female menstrual cycle, the window for fertilization during each cycle is finite. However, the precise number of days per month a women is fertile remains unclear. On the low end, the window of opportunity lasts for an estimated two days, based on the survival time of the sperm and egg. On the high end, the World Health Organization estimates a fertility window of 10 days. Somewhere in the middle lies a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which suggests that six is the magic number of days.

Assuming the fertility window is open, getting pregnant depends on a sperm cell making it to where the egg is located. Achieving that goal is not an easy feat. To help overcome the odds, we have evolved a number of biological tactics. For instance, the volume of a typical male human ejaculate is about a half-teaspoon or more and is estimated to contain about 300 million sperm cells. To become fully active, sperm cells require modification. The acidic environment of the vagina helps with that modification, allowing sperm to gain what is called hyperactive motility, in which its whip-like tail motors it along toward the egg.

Once active, sperm cells begin their long journey through the female reproductive system. To help guide the way, the cells around the female egg emit a chemical substance that attracts sperm cells. The orientation toward these chemicals is called chemotaxis and helps the sperm cells swim in the right direction (after all, they don’t have eyes). Furthermore, sperm get a little extra boost by the contraction of the muscles lining the female reproductive tract, which aid in pushing the little guys along. But, despite all of these efforts, sperm cell death rates are quite high, and only about 200 sperm cells actually make it to the oviduct (also called the fallopian tube), where the egg awaits.

Act III: Egg marks the spot

With the target in sight, the sperm cells make a beeline for the egg. However, for successful fertilization, only a single sperm cell can fuse with the egg. If an egg fuses with more than one sperm, the outcome can be anything from a failure of fertilization to the development of an embryo and fetus, known as a partial hydatidiform mole, that has a complete extra set of chromosomes and will not survive. Luckily, the egg has ways to help ensure only one sperm fuses with it.

When it reaches the egg, the sperm cell attaches to the surface of the zona pellucida, a protective shell for the egg. For the sperm to fuse with the egg, it must first break through this shell. Enter the sperm cell’s acrosome, which acts as an enzymatic drill. This “drilling,” in combination with the propeller movement of the sperm’s tail, helps to create a hole so that the sperm cell can access the juicy bits of the egg.

This breach of the zona pellucida and fusion of the sperm and egg sets off a rapid cascade of events to block other sperm cells from penetrating the egg’s protective shell. The first response is a shift in the charge of the egg’s cell membrane from negative to positive. This change in charge creates a sort of electrical force field, repelling other sperm cells.

Though this response is lightning fast, it is a temporary measure. A more permanent solution involves the cortical granuleswithin the egg. These tiny sacs release their contents, causing the zona pellucida to harden like the setting of concrete. In effect, the egg–sperm fusion induces the egg to construct a virtually impenetrable wall. Left outside in the cold, the other, unsuccessful sperm cells die within 48 hours.

Now that the sperm–egg fusion has gone down, the egg start the maturation required for embryo-fetal development. The fertilized egg, now called a zygote, begins its journey into the womb and immediately begins round after round of cell division, over a few weeks resulting in a multicellular organism with a heart, lungs, brain, blood, bones, muscles, and hair. It’s an amazing phenomenon that I’m honored to have experienced (although I didn’t know I was until several weeks later).

The Afterword: A note on genetics

A normal human cell that is not a sperm or an egg will contain 23 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 46 chromosomes. Any deviation from this number of chromosomes will lead to developmental misfires that in most cases results in a non-viable embryo. However, in some instances, a deviation from 46 chromosomes allows for fetal development and birth. The most well-known example is Trisomy 21(having three copies of the 21st chromosome per cell instead of two), also called Down’s Syndrome.

The egg and sperm cells are unlike any other cell in our body. They’re special enough to have a special name, gametes, and they each contain one set of chromosomes, or 23 chromosomes. Because they have half the typical number per cell, when the egg and sperm cell fuse, the resulting zygote contains the typical chromosome number of 46. Now you know how we get half of our genes from our father (who made the sperm cell) and half from our mother (who made the egg cell). Did I just put in your head an image of your parents having sex? It’s the birds and the bees, folks—it applies to everyone!

World Health Organization. “A prospective multicentre trial of the ovulation method of natural family planning. III. Characteristics of the menstrual cycle and of the fertile phase,” Fertil Steril(1983);40:773-778

Allen J. Wilcox, et al. “Timing of Sexual Intercourse in Relation to Ovulation — Effects on the Probability of Conception, Survival of the Pregnancy, and Sex of the Baby,” New England Journal of Medicine, (1995); 333:1517-1521

[Editor’s note: We are pleased to be able to run this post by Dr. Kate Clancy that first appeared at Clancy’s Scientific American blog, the wonderful Context and Variation. Clancy is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. She studies the evolutionary medicine of women’s reproductive physiology, and blogs about her field, the evolution of human behavior and issues for women in science. You can follow her on Twitter–which we strongly recommend, particularly if you’re interested in human behavior, evolutionary medicine, and ladybusiness–@KateClancy.]

Over the course of my training to become a biological anthropologist with a specialty in women’s reproductive ecology and life history theory, or ladybusiness expert, I have learned a lot about miscarriage. Only it wasn’t miscarriage, it was spontaneous abortion. Except that some didn’t like the term spontaneous abortion and used intrauterine mortality (Wood, 1994). Or fetal loss. Fetal loss is probably the most common.

There is also pregnancy loss (Holman and Wood, 2001). You can use that term, too. Oh, or aContinue reading →

Today, Carolyn S. Miles, president and CEO at Save the Children writes at the Huffington Post (ducks) about the latest findings regarding our ability to stop a preterm birth from happening. As anyone who’s given birth knows, it’s not easy to stop that process once it starts, and that persistent inability means devastating outcomes for some families. As Miles writes:

Back in 1978, psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch published the first popular book on anorexia nervosa. In The Golden Cage, she described anorexia as a psychological illness caused by environmental factors: sexual abuse, over-controlling parents, fears about growing up, and/or other psychodynamic factors. Bruch believed young patients needed to be separated from their families (a concept that became known as a “parentectomy”) so therapists could help them work through the root issues underlying the illness. Then, and only then, patients would choose to resume eating. If they were still alive.

Bruch’s observations dictated eating-disorders treatments for decades, treatments that led to spectacularly ineffective results. Only about 35% of people with anorexia recovered; another 20% died, of starvation or suicide; and the rest lived with some level of chronic illness for the rest of their lives.

Not a great track record, overall, and especially devastating for women, who suffer from anorexia at a rate of 10 times that of men. Luckily, we know a lot more about anorexia and other eating disorders now than we did in 1978.

“It’s Not About the Food”

In Bruch’s day, anorexia wasn’t the only illness attributed to faulty parenting and/or trauma. Therapists saw depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, eating disorders, and homosexuality (long considered a psychiatric “illness”) as ailments of the mind alone. Thanks to the rising field of behavioral neuroscience, we’ve begun to untangle the ways brain circuitry, neural architecture, and other biological processes contribute to these disorders. Most experts now agree that depression and anxiety can be caused by, say, neurotransmitter imbalances as much as unresolved emotional conflicts, and treat them accordingly. But the field of eating-disorders treatment has been slow to jump on the neurobiology bandwagon. When my daughter was diagnosed with anorexia in 2005, for instance, we were told to find her a therapist and try to get our daughter to eat “without being the food police,” because, as one therapist informed us, “It’s not about the food.”

Actually, it is about the food. Especially when you’re starving.

Ancel Keys’ 1950 Semi-Starvation Study tracked the effects of starvation and subsequent re-feeding on 36 healthy young men, all conscientious objectors who volunteered for the experiment. Keys was drawn to the subject during World War II, when millions in war-torn Europe – especially those in concentration camps – starved for years. One of Keys’ most interesting findings was that starvation itself, followed by re-feeding after a period of prolonged starvation, produced both physical and psychological symptoms, including depression, preoccupation with weight and body image, anxiety, and obsessions with food, eating, and cooking—all symptoms we now associate with anorexia. Re-feeding the volunteers eventuallyreversed most of the symptoms. However, this approach proved to be difficult on a psychological level, and in some ways more difficult than the starvation period. These results were a clear illustration of just how profound the effects of months of starvation were on the body and mind.

Alas, Keys’ findings were pretty much ignored by the field of eating-disorders treatment for 40-some years, until new technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and research gave new context to his work. We now know there is no single root cause for eating disorders. They’re what researchers call multi-factorial, triggered by a perfect storm of factors that probably differs for each person who develops an eating disorder. “Personality characteristics, the environment you live in, your genetic makeup—it’s like a cake recipe,” says Daniel le Grange, Ph.D., director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of Chicago. “All the ingredients have to be there for that person to develop anorexia.”

One of those ingredients is genetics. Twenty years ago, the Price Foundation sponsored a project that collected DNA samples from thousands of people with eating disorders, their families, and control participants. That data, along with information from the 2006 Swedish Twin Study, suggests that anorexia is highly heritable. “Genes play a substantial role in liability to this illness,” says Cindy Bulik, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and director of the University of North Carolina’s Eating Disorders Program. And while no one has yet found a specific anorexia gene, researchers are focusing on an area of chromosome 1 that shows important gene linkages.

Certain personality traits associated with anorexia are probably heritable as well. “Anxiety, inhibition, obsessionality, and perfectionism seem to be present in families of people with an eating disorder,” explains Walter Kaye, M.D., who directs the Eating Disorders Treatment and Research Program at the University of California-San Diego. Another ingredient is neurobiology—literally, the way your brain is structured and how it works. Dr. Kaye’s team at UCSD uses fMRI technology to map blood flow in people’s brains as they think of or perform a task. In one study, Kaye and his colleagues looked at the brains of people with anorexia, people recovered from anorexia, and people who’d never had an eating disorder as they played a gambling game. Participants were asked to guess a number and were rewarded for correct guesses with money or “punished” for incorrect or no guesses by losing money.

Participants in the control group responded to wins and losses by “living in the moment,” wrote researchers: “That is, they made a guess and then moved on to the next task.” But people with anorexia, as well as people who’d recovered from anorexia, showed greater blood flow to the dorsal caudate, an area of the brain that helps link actions and their outcomes, as well as differences in their brains’ dopamine pathways. “People with anorexia nervosa do not live in the moment,” concluded Kaye. “They tend to have exaggerated and obsessive worry about the consequences of their behaviors, looking for rules when there are none, and they are overly concerned about making mistakes.” This study was the first to show altered pathways in the brain even in those recovered from anorexia, suggesting that inherent differences in the brain’s architecture and signaling systems help trigger the illness in the first place.

Food Is Medicine

Some of the best news to come out of research on anorexia is a new therapy aimed at kids and teens. Family-based treatment (FBT), also known as the Maudsley approach, was developed at the Maudsley Hospital in London by Ivan Eisler and Christopher Dare, family therapists who watched nurses on the inpatient eating-disorders unit get patients to eat by sitting with them, talking to them, rubbing their backs, and supporting them. Eisler and Dare wondered how that kind of effective encouragement could be used outside the hospital.

Their observations led them to develop family-based treatment, or FBT, a three-phase treatment for teens and young adults that sidesteps the debate on etiology and focuses instead on recovery. “FBT is agnostic on cause,” says Dr. Le Grange. During phase one, families (usually parents) take charge of a child’s eating, with a goal of fully restoring weight (rather than get to the “90 percent of ideal body weight” many programs use as a benchmark). In phase two, families gradually transfer responsibility for eating back to the teen. Phase three addresses other problems or issues related to normal adolescent development, if there are any.

FBT is a pragmatic approach that recognizes that while people with anorexia are in the throes of acute malnourishment, they can’t choose to eat. And that represents one of the biggest shifts in thinking about eating disorders. The DSM-IV, the most recent “bible” of psychiatric treatment, lists as the first symptom of anorexia “a refusal to maintain body weight at or above a minimally normal weight for age and height.” That notion of refusal is key to how anorexia has been seen, and treated, in the past: as a refusal to eat or gain weight. An acting out. A choice. Which makes sense within the psychodynamic model of cause.

But it doesn’t jibe with the research, which suggests that anorexia is more of an inability to eat than a refusal. Forty-five years ago, Aryeh Routtenberg, then (and still) a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, discovered that when he gave rats only brief daily access to food but let them run as much as they wanted on wheels, they would gradually eat less and less, and run more and more. In fact, they would run without eating until they died, a paradigm Routtenberg called activity-based anorexia (ABA). Rats with ABA seemed to be in the grip of a profound physiological imbalance, one that overrode the normal biological imperatives of hunger and self-preservation. ABA in rats suggests that however it starts, once the cycle of restricting and/or compulsive exercising passes a certain threshold, it takes on a life of its own. Self-starvation is no longer (if it ever was) a choice, but a compulsion to the death.

That’s part of the thinking in FBT. Food is the best medicine for people with anorexia, but they can’t choose to eat. They need someone else to make that choice for them. Therapists don’t sit at the table with patients, but parents do. And parents love and know their children. Like the nurses at the Maudsley Hospital, they find ways to get kids to eat. In a sense, what parents do is outshout the anorexia “voice” many sufferers report hearing, a voice in their heads that tells them not to eat and berates them when they do. Parents take the responsibility for making the choice to eat away from the sufferer, who may insist she’s choosing not to eat but who, underneath the illness, is terrified and hungry.

The best aspect of FBT is that it works. Not for everyone, but for the majority of kids and teens. Several randomized controlled studies of FBT and “treatment as usual” (talk therapy without pressure to eat) show recovery rates of 80 to 90 percent with FBT—a huge improvement over previous recovery rates. A study at the University of Chicago is looking at adapting the treatment for young adults; early results are promising.

The most challenging aspect of FBT is that it’s hard to find. Relatively few therapists in the U.S. are trained in the approach. When our daughter got sick, my husband and I couldn’t find a local FBT therapist. So we cobbled together a team that included our pediatrician, a therapist, and lots of friends who supported our family through the grueling work of re-feeding our daughter. Today she’s a healthy college student with friends, a boyfriend, career goals, and a good relationship with us.

A few years ago, Dr. Le Grange and his research partner, Dr. James Lock of Stanford, created a training institute that certifies a handful of FBT therapists each year. (For a list of FBT providers, visit the Maudsley Parents website.) It’s a start. But therapists are notoriously slow to adopt new treatments, and FBT is no exception. Some therapists find FBT controversial because it upends the conventional view of eating disorders and treatments. Some cling to the psychodynamic view of eating disorders despite the lack of evidence. Still, many in the field have at least heard of FBT and Kaye’s neurobiological findings, even if they don’t believe in them yet.

One of those ingredients is genetics. Twenty years ago, the Price Foundation sponsored a project that collected DNA samples from thousands of people with eating disorders, their families, and control participants. That data, along with information from the 2006 Swedish Twin Study, suggests that anorexia is highly heritable. “Genes play a substantial role in liability to this illness,” says Cindy Bulik, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and director of the University of North Carolina’s Eating Disorders Program. And while no one has yet found a specific anorexia gene, researchers are focusing on an area of chromosome 1 that shows important gene linkages.

Certain personality traits associated with anorexia are probably heritable as well. “Anxiety, inhibition, obsessionality, and perfectionism seem to be present in families of people with an eating disorder,” explains Walter Kaye, M.D., who directs the Eating Disorders Treatment and Research Program at the University of California-San Diego. Another ingredient is neurobiology—literally, the way your brain is structured and how it works. Dr. Kaye’s team at UCSD uses fMRI technology to map blood flow in people’s brains as they think of or perform a task. In one study, Kaye and his colleagues looked at the brains of people with anorexia, people recovered from anorexia, and people who’d never had an eating disorder as they played a gambling game. Participants were asked to guess a number and were rewarded for correct guesses with money or “punished” for incorrect or no guesses by losing money.

Participants in the control group responded to wins and losses by “living in the moment,” wrote researchers: “That is, they made a guess and then moved on to the next task.” But people with anorexia, as well as people who’d recovered from anorexia, showed greater blood flow to the dorsal caudate, an area of the brain that helps link actions and their outcomes, as well as differences in their brains’ dopamine pathways. “People with anorexia nervosa do not live in the moment,” concluded Kaye. “They tend to have exaggerated and obsessive worry about the consequences of their behaviors, looking for rules when there are none, and they are overly concerned about making mistakes.” This study was the first to show altered pathways in the brain even in those recovered from anorexia, suggesting that inherent differences in the brain’s architecture and signaling systems help trigger the illness in the first place.

Food Is Medicine

Some of the best news to come out of research on anorexia is a new therapy aimed at kids and teens. Family-based treatment (FBT), also known as the Maudsley approach, was developed at the Maudsley Hospital in London by Ivan Eisler and Christopher Dare, family therapists who watched nurses on the inpatient eating-disorders unit get patients to eat by sitting with them, talking to them, rubbing their backs, and supporting them. Eisler and Dare wondered how that kind of effective encouragement could be used outside the hospital.

Their observations led them to develop family-based treatment, or FBT, a three-phase treatment for teens and young adults that sidesteps the debate on etiology and focuses instead on recovery. “FBT is agnostic on cause,” says Dr. Le Grange. During phase one, families (usually parents) take charge of a child’s eating, with a goal of fully restoring weight (rather than get to the “90 percent of ideal body weight” many programs use as a benchmark). In phase two, families gradually transfer responsibility for eating back to the teen. Phase three addresses other problems or issues related to normal adolescent development, if there are any.

FBT is a pragmatic approach that recognizes that while people with anorexia are in the throes of acute malnourishment, they can’t choose to eat. And that represents one of the biggest shifts in thinking about eating disorders. The DSM-IV, the most recent “bible” of psychiatric treatment, lists as the first symptom of anorexia “a refusal to maintain body weight at or above a minimally normal weight for age and height.” That notion of refusal is key to how anorexia has been seen, and treated, in the past: as a refusal to eat or gain weight. An acting out. A choice. Which makes sense within the psychodynamic model of cause.

But it doesn’t jibe with the research, which suggests that anorexia is more of an inability to eat than a refusal. Forty-five years ago, Aryeh Routtenberg, then (and still) a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, discovered that when he gave rats only brief daily access to food but let them run as much as they wanted on wheels, they would gradually eat less and less, and run more and more. In fact, they would run without eating until they died, a paradigm Routtenberg called activity-based anorexia (ABA). Rats with ABA seemed to be in the grip of a profound physiological imbalance, one that overrode the normal biological imperatives of hunger and self-preservation. ABA in rats suggests that however it starts, once the cycle of restricting and/or compulsive exercising passes a certain threshold, it takes on a life of its own. Self-starvation is no longer (if it ever was) a choice, but a compulsion to the death.

That’s part of the thinking in FBT. Food is the best medicine for people with anorexia, but they can’t choose to eat. They need someone else to make that choice for them. Therapists don’t sit at the table with patients, but parents do. And parents love and know their children. Like the nurses at the Maudsley Hospital, they find ways to get kids to eat. In a sense, what parents do is outshout the anorexia “voice” many sufferers report hearing, a voice in their heads that tells them not to eat and berates them when they do. Parents take the responsibility for making the choice to eat away from the sufferer, who may insist she’s choosing not to eat but who, underneath the illness, is terrified and hungry.

The best aspect of FBT is that it works. Not for everyone, but for the majority of kids and teens. Several randomized controlled studies of FBT and “treatment as usual” (talk therapy without pressure to eat) show recovery rates of 80 to 90 percent with FBT—a huge improvement over previous recovery rates. A study at the University of Chicago is looking at adapting the treatment for young adults; early results are promising.

The most challenging aspect of FBT is that it’s hard to find. Relatively few therapists in the U.S. are trained in the approach. When our daughter got sick, my husband and I couldn’t find a local FBT therapist. So we cobbled together a team that included our pediatrician, a therapist, and lots of friends who supported our family through the grueling work of re-feeding our daughter. Today she’s a healthy college student with friends, a boyfriend, career goals, and a good relationship with us.

A few years ago, Dr. Le Grange and his research partner, Dr. James Lock of Stanford, created a training institute that certifies a handful of FBT therapists each year. (For a list of FBT providers, visit the Maudsley Parents website.) It’s a start. But therapists are notoriously slow to adopt new treatments, and FBT is no exception. Some therapists find FBT controversial because it upends the conventional view of eating disorders and treatments. Some cling to the psychodynamic view of eating disorders despite the lack of evidence. Still, many in the field have at least heard of FBT and Kaye’s neurobiological findings, even if they don’t believe in them yet.

[Today’s post first appeared at Dr. Kristina Killgrove’s blog, Powered by Osteons. Kristina is a bioarchaeologist who studies the skeletons of ancient Romans to learn more about how they lived. Her biography at her blog begins, “When your life’s passion is to study dead Romans, you often get asked for your ‘origin story,’ something that explains a long, abiding and, frankly, slightly creepy love for skeletons.” Now that you undoubtedly want to know more, read the rest of her bio here, and then read below to learn why childbirth is so difficult and what the archaeological record has to tell us about outcomes for mother and child in the ancient world. For more about Kristina and her work, you can see her academic Website at Killgrove.org and find out about her latest research project at RomanDNAProject.org. You can also find her at herG+ page and on Twitter as @BoneGirlPhD.]

Basically since we started walking upright, childbirth has been difficult for women. Evolution selected for larger and larger brains in our hominin ancestors such that today our newborns have heads roughly 102% the size of the mother’s pelvic inlet width (Rosenberg 1992).

Obviously, we’ve also evolved ways to get those babies out. Biologically, towards the end of pregnancy, a hormone is released that weakens the cartilage of the pelvic joints, allowing the bones to spread; and the fetus itself goes through a complicated movement to make its way down the pelvic canal, with its skull bones eventually sliding around and overlapping to get through the pelvis. Culturally, we have another way to deliver these large babies: the so-calledcaesarean section.

Up until the 20th century, childbirth was dangerous. Even today, in some less developed countries, roughly 1 maternal death occurs for every 100 live births, most of those related to obstructed labor or hemorrhage (WHO Fact Sheet 2010). If we project these figures back into the past, millions of women must have died during or just after childbirth over the last several millennia. You would think, then, that the discovery of childbirth-related burial – that is, of a woman with a fetal skeleton within her pelvis – would be common in the archaeological record. It’s not.

Archaeological Evidence of Death in Childbirth

Two recent articles in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology start the exact same way, by explaining that “despite this general acceptance of the vulnerability of young females in the past, there are very few cases of pregnant woman (sic) reported from archaeological contexts” (Willis & Oxenham, In Press) and “archaeological evidence for such causes of death is scarce and therefore unlikely to reflect the high incidence of mortality during and after labour” (Cruz & Codinha 2010:491).

The examples of burials of pregnant women that tend to get cited include two from Britain (both published in the 1970s), four from Scandinavia (published in the 1970s and 1980s), three from North America (published in the 1980s), one from Australia (1980s), one from Israel (1990s), six from Spain (1990s and 2000s), one from Portugal (2010), and one from Vietnam (2011) (most of these are cited in Willis & Oxenham). Additionally, I found some unpublished reports: a skeleton from Egypt, a body from the Yorkshire Wolds in England, and a skeleton from England.

The images of these burials are impressive: even more than child skeletons, these tableaux are pathos-triggering, they’re snapshots of two lives cut short because of an evolutionary trade-off.

The wide range of dates and geographical areas illustrated in the slideshow demonstrates quite clearly that death of the mother-fetus dyad is a biological consequence of being human. But what we have from archaeological excavations is still fewer than two dozen examples of possible childbirth-related deaths from allof human history.

Where are all the mother-fetus burials?

As with any bioarchaeological question, there are a number of reasons that we may or may not find evidence of practices we know to have existed in the past. Some key issues at play in recovering evidence of death in childbirth include:

Archaeological Theory and Methodology. From the dates of discovery of maternal-fetal death cited above, it’s obvious that these examples weren’t discovered until the 1970s. Why the 70s? It could be that the rise of feminist archaeology focused new attention on the graves of females, with archaeologists realizing the possibility that they would find maternal-fetal burials. Or it could be that the methods employed got better around this time: archaeologists began to sift dirt with smaller mesh screens and float it for small particles like seeds and fetal bones.

Death at Different Times. Although some women surely perished in the middle of childbirth, along with a fetus that was obstructed, in many cases delivery likely occurred, after which the mother, fetus, or both died. In modern medical literature, there are direct maternal deaths (complications of pregnancy, delivery, or recovery) and indirect maternal deaths (pregnancy-related death of a woman with preexisting or newly arisen health problems) recorded up to about 42 days postpartum. An infection related to delivery or severe postpartum hemorraging could easily have killed a woman in antiquity, leaving a viable newborn. Similarly, newborns can develop infections and other conditions once outside the womb, and infant mortality was high in preindustrial societies. With a difference between the time of death of the mother and child, a bioarchaeologist can’t say for sure that these deaths were related to childbirth. Even finding a female skeleton with a fetal skeleton inside it is not always a clear example, as there are forensic cases of coffin birth or postmortem fetal extrusion, when the non-viable fetus is spontaneously delivered after the death of the mother.

Cultural Practices. Another condition of being human is the ability to modify and mediate our biology through culture. So the final possibility for the lack of mother-fetus burials is a specific society’s cultural practices in terms of childbirth and burial. In the case of complicated childbirth (called dystocia in the medical literature), this is done through caesarean section (or C-section), a surgical procedure that dates back at least to the origins of ancient Rome.

Cultural Interventions in Childbirth

It’s often assumed that the term caesarean/cesarean section comes from the manner of birth ofJulius Caesar, but it seems that the Roman author Pliny may have just made this up. The written record of the surgical practice originated as the Lex Regia (royal law) with the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius (c. 700 BC), and was renamed the Lex Caesarea (imperial law) during the Empire. The law is passed down through Justinian’s Digest (11.8.2) and reads:

The royal law forbids burying a woman who died pregnant until her offspring has been excised from her; anyone who does otherwise is seen to have killed the hope of the offspring with the pregnant woman. [Translation mine]

There’s discussion as to whether this law was instituted for religious reasons or for the more practical reason of increasing the population of tax-paying citizens. In spite of this law, though, there isn’t much historical evidence of people being born by C-section. Many articles claim the earliest attested C-section as having produced Gorgias, an orator from Sicily, in 508 BC (e.g., Boley 1991), but Gorgias wasn’t actually born until 485 BC and I couldn’t find a confirmatory source for this claim. Pliny, however, noted that Scipio Africanus, a celebrated Roman general in the Second Punic War, was born by C-section (Historia Naturalis VII.7); if this fact is correct, the earliest confirmation that the surgery could produce viable offspring dates to 236 BC.

This practice in the Roman world is not the same as our contemporary idea of C-section. That is, the mother was not expected to survive and, in fact, most of the C-sections in Roman times were likely carried out following the death of the mother. Until about the 1500s, when the French physician François Rousset broke with tradition and advocated performing C-sections on living women, the procedure was performed only as a last-ditch effort to save the neonate. Some women definitely survived C-sections from the 16th to 19th centuries, but it was still a risky procedure that could easily lead to complications like endometritis or other infection. Following advances in antibiotics around 1940, though, C-sections became more common because, most importantly, they were much more survivable.

In spite of the Romans’ passion for recordkeeping, there’s very little evidence of C-sections. It’s unclear how religiously the Lex Regia/Caesarea was followed in Roman times, which means it’s unclear how often the practice of C-section occurred. Would all women have been subject to these laws? Just the elite or just citizens? How often did the section result in a viable newborn? Who performed the surgery? It probably wasn’t a physician (since men didn’t generally attend births), but a midwife wouldn’t have been trained to do it either (Turfa 1994).

Whereas we can supplement the historical record with bioarchaeological evidence to understand Romans’ knowledge of anatomy, their consumption of lead sugar, or the practice of crucifixion, this isn’t possible with C-sections – the surgery is done in soft tissue only, meaning we’d have to find a mummy to get conclusive evidence of an ancient C-section.

We can make the hypothesis, though, that because of the Lex Regia/Caesarea, we should findno evidence in the Roman world of a woman buried with a fetus still inside her. This hypothesis, though, is quickly negated by two reported cases – one from Kent in the Romano-British period and one from Jerusalem in the 4th century AD. The burial from Kent hasn’t been published, although there is a photograph in the slide show above.

Interestingly, the Jerusalem find was studied and reported by Joe Zias, who also analyzed theonly known case of crucifixion to date. Zias and colleagues report on the find in Nature(1993) and in an edited volume (1995), but their primary goal was to disseminate information about the presence of cannabis in the tomb (and its supposed role in facilitating childbirth), so there’s no picture and the information about the skeletons is severely lacking:

We found the skeletal remains of a girl (sic) aged about 14 at death in an undisturbed family burial tomb in Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem. Three bronze coins found in the tomb dating to AD 315-392 indicate that the tomb was in use during the fourth century AD. We found the skeletal remains of a full-term (40-week) fetus in the pelvic area of the girl, who was lying on her back in an extended position, apparently in the last stages of pregnancy or giving birth at the time of her death… It seems likely that the immature pelvic structure through which the full-term fetus was required to pass was the cause of death in this case, due to rupture of the cervix and eventual haemorrhage (Zias et al. 1993:215).

Both Roman-era examples involve young women, and it is quite interesting that they were already fertile. Age at menarche in the Roman world depended on health, which in turn depended on status, but it’s generally accepted that menarche happened around 14-15 years old and that fertility lagged behind until 16-17, meaning for the majority of the Roman female population, first birth would not occur until at least 17-19 years of age (Hopkins 1965, Amundsen & Diers 1969). These numbers have led demographers like Tim Parkin (1992:104-5) to note that pregnancy was likely not a major contributor to premature death among Roman women. But the female pelvis doesn’t reach skeletal maturity until the late teens or early 20s, so complications from the incompatibility in pelvis size versus fetal head size are not uncommon in teen pregnancies, even today (Gilbert et al. 2004).

More interesting than the young age at parturition is the fact that both of these young women were likely buried with their fetuses still inside them, in direct violation of the Lex Caesarea. So it remains unclear whether this law was ever prosecuted, or if the application of the law varied based on location (these young women were both from the provinces), social status (both young women were likely higher status), or time period. Why wasn’t medical intervention, namely C-section, attempted on these young women? It’s possible that further context clues from the cemeteries and associated settlements could give us more information about medical practices in these specific locales, but neither the Zias articles nor the Kent report make this information available.

Childbirth – Biological or Cultural?

Childbirth is both a biological and a cultural process. While biological variation is consistent across all human populations, the cultural processes that can facilitate childbirth are quite varied. The evidence that bioarchaeologists use to reconstruct childbirth in the past includes skeletons of mothers and their fetuses; historical records of births, deaths, and interventions; artifacts that facilitate delivery; and context clues from burials. The brief case study of death in childbirth in the Roman world further shows that history alone is insufficient to understand the process of childbirth, the complications inherent in it, and the form of burial that results. In order to develop a better understanding of childbirth through time, it’s imperative that archaeologists pay close attention when excavating graves, meticulously document their findings, and publish any evidence of death in childbirth.